For Veteran's Day

This morning me and my family headed to the high school for the Veteran's Day program, where our quilt guild handed out quilts we had made for the local WW2 and Korean War veterans.

It was really great to see the guys get their quilts, and how happy it made them.

 

During the program there were a lot of speeches about remembering to thank our Veteran's, and how to do community service to help give back to them for their sacrifice.

 

I'm not putting down those speeches at all, because they were very good and true. We do need to thank the veterans in our lives. And we should try to give back to them in some way. That's the whole reason I helped make quilts with the rest of the guild.

 

But I want to go a step further this Veteran's Day.

Go beyond saying thank you one day out of the year.

Go beyond volunteering your time and money for a good cause even.

We can also let our veteran's know that we are thankful for all they have done, by protecting what they have given us.

Freedom.

 

 

It's true. We are in charge of keeping our freedoms. It's like when we were little kids and we would lose something and go crying to our parents.

My parent's always told me that it was my <toy, book, whatever> and I should have taken better care of it.

The same thing can be said of our freedom.

When the pilgrims came to America it was to have freedom.

The Revolutionary War erupted because of freedom.

The Civil War was largely over freedom of the states.

World War I, II, Korea, Vietnam,

and now in Iraq, Afghanistan and many other places, were and are being fought to protect the freedom of American's, and give freedom to others.

Men and women have been fighting and dying for years to give us the freedoms we have today.

Freedom of speech. Religion. Press. Life. Liberty. The pursuit of happiness. The right to bear arms.

We would have any of those if soldiers hadn't repeatedly stepped forward throughout the years to secure and protect them.

 

Now that we have these freedoms, it is our duty as the people to protect them. As American's, no one is going to just come and take them away. We don't have that kind of personality that we would just let some foreign group come and take over.

The only way we will lose these precious freedoms is if we give them away, willingly, in exchange for some service or another that we have been swayed to feel is more important.

But the things we are being told are important can't exist without these freedoms the founding fathers gave us, and the soldiers have protected.

Right now society is so focused on racial equality, women's rights, prosperity in the careers we choose, and education.

All very good things.

The freedoms we have protect all of those things.

The Declaration of Independence says

"...all men are created equal..."

Women have been given the rights to vote, join the army, and everything else they want.

Things like abortion are not a right. It is a way to withhold those rights from future women.

We have the right to life.

We have the right to "the pursuit of happiness". No government can guarantee our success in our careers, but we have the right to go after it with all our might.

We don't have to give up our rights to secure these things for ourselves. We have to protect them.

By doing that, we show our veterans that we value what they did.